Popular Social Media in China

Popular Social Media in China

We all like our home comforts and we get used to having things that are readily available to us, however, we do not always find these tools when we travel. Social media is the most powerful tool we have for communicating with people and accessing information on anything we may want to research, In China they use other reliable and popular sociable media tools that enable you to communicate with the community at large. Some of these these will be useful to you during your time teaching in China.

QQ

QQ is an abbreviation of Tencent QQ, a widely popular instant messaging service. Almost every chinese has QQ account. Currently QQ International is available for both desktop and mobile platforms in many languages QQ International offers comprehensive online communication functions, including text messaging, video and voice chat as well as online and offline file transmission, and more. By Last September, there were 784 million active user accounts with approximately 100 million online at a time. According to Alexa Internet rankings, the QQ website ranked 8th – moving it ahead of Twitter. You can find more in QQ official website: http://www.imqq.com

WeChat

Wechat — is a mobile voice and text app. With social features, you can chat with your friends instantly via voice messages, texts, images, voice call and video call; Look around to find and chat with people nearby; share your pictures and comments with your friends, incredibly easy friend adding by shaking your phones together and scanning QR codes. You can also create group chats to chat with several friends together. All of these features are free of charge. Currently, WeChat has half billion active monthly users. Wechat official website: http://www.wechat.com/en/

Weibo

“Weibo” is the Chinese word for “microblog”. Known as the “Twitter of China”, Sina Weibo is actually much more than just that – it has over twice as many users as Twitter, and it’s used by more than 22% of the Chinese Internet population of almost 540 million people! Sina Weibo is well ahead of the game in providing users with the ability to include images and videos. Weibo provides an unprecedented and simple way for people and organizations to publicly express themselves in real time, interact with others on a massive global platform and stay connected with the world. Any user can create and post a feed of up to 140 words and attach multimedia or long-form content. User relationships on Weibo may be asymmetric; any user can follow any other user and add comments to a feed while reposting. Weibo’s sway has a lot to do with its influential user accounts such as business tycoons, celebrities, and media figures. It initially launched as “Sina Weibo,” but shed the “Sina” prefix back in March, 2014. Weibo official website: http://www.weibo.com/signup/mobile.php?lang=en-us

RenRen

Renren is essentially China’s Facebook as RenRen not only fronts a similar layout and colours but also has a lot of the same features – such as profile creation, a friend’s list, fan pages, and a messaging application. Formerly called Xiaonei, which means “schoolyard”, it began as a platform for re-connecting friends from school. Like Facebook, Renren aims to stay up-to-date in the fast-growing mobile space and cater to college students and young white collar professionals across the country.. Renren enables users to connect and communicate with each other, share information, create user generated content, play online games, and enjoy a wide range of other features and services. Renren has an estimated 200 million active users. RenRen official website: http://www.renren-inc.com/en/

Douban

Douban is very similar to MySpace, popular with special interest groups and communities, and for networking around specific topics. It has over 100 million users and it’s most active users are intellectuals and pop culture junkies looking for movie, music and book reviews with around 60 million registered users and 80 million active users per month. For the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Douban extended its keyword list to ban any terms that may be relevant to the incident. Douban official website: http://www.douban.com/ (only in Chinese)

Youku

Youku, meaning “excellent (and) cool”, is the second largest video site in the world after Youtube. Youku has partnered with over 1,500 license holders, including television stations, distributors, and film and TV production companies in China that regularly upload media content on the site. On March 12, 2012 – the two biggest video online companies in China, Youku and Tudou, announced their merger – the name of the merged company is Youku Tudou Inc. Youku official website: http://www.youku.com/ (in chinese only)